Printed wireless antennas are employed in a variety of applications, including mobile computing devices (e.g. smart phones) and wireless adapters connectable to computing devices (e.g. desktop computers, “smart” televisions and the like) to enable wireless communication with those devices. Patch elements are common in such antennas; a conventional approach employed to increase the gain or frequency response of a wireless antenna is to replace a single patch (or indeed other types of antenna element) with an array of patches.
Arrays of antenna elements, however, require complex networks of feed lines. In addition to the increased complexity—and therefore cost—of manufacturing such feed line networks, the feed lines can also result in undesirable interference (e.g. due to mutual coupling between the feed lines and the antenna elements), and in undesirably reduced impedance bandwidth. These difficulties are particularly severe at higher frequencies, such as those employed by the IEEE 802.11ad wireless communications standard (also referred to as WiGig™), which prescribes channels having frequencies of about 58 GHz, 60 GHz, 62 GHz and 64 GHz.